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Monday, July 30, 2012

It’s been an unusual growing season to say the least.In early July I was getting ripe tomatoes,
green beans, squash and peppers from the garden.With the exception of a few peppers I haven’t
gotten any of those for a few weeks.There may not be any more squash, but there’s lots of tomatoes, peppers
and beans that should be ready in a week or two.Still and all, in midsummer you really
expect to have these things without interruption.

The one exception to the scarcity is the cucumber, and
there’s few things better than cucumbers on a hot day, unless it’s cucumbers
and tomatoes.The Diva plant has been
growing fast and producing well.After
the four seeds started indoors did not germinate (that after the germination
tests were 100%) I planted the remaining two or three seeds directly in the
bed.This is the only one that
germinated and it was behind some broccoli plants.Eventually it got to the trellis and took
off.

I got acauliflower,
the first one I’ve grown.A little soft
but OK.Considering the weather I’ll
take it.

The blue potatoes were dug up.They are shaped like Russet potatoes but are
more like waxy potatoes.The blue is on
the inside and they are delicious.Yields weren’t as good as the Reds though, a little over 5 lbs.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

At this point the name of the game is keep the plants
alive.Most of the work in the yard
consists of watering.So far I have
watered about two days out of three, usually in the evening.Watering in the evening gives more time for
the water to percolate into the soil without any direct sun to pull water the
wrong way.The sustained watering
campaign has paid off as most of the vegetable plants look healthy now.Production is mostly on hold - I’ve picked only a few peppers and no squash,
beans or tomatoes for several weeks.

The
only reliably producing green vegetable right now is the cucumber.The Diva
plant thrives in this heat.I counted five
cukes that will be ready to pick shortly.Last year I lost all the cucurbits except the butternut to bacterial
wilt.After a year without them it’s
good to have that fresh snap of a cold cucumber back, especially when I’m not
getting much of anything else.

Except
for the lone Rosa Bianca eggplant, everything in the solanacae bed looks
well.There haven’t been any tomatoes
since mid July after the extended hot spell (four or five consecutive days over
100 F) and an early bout with blossom end rot.The Supersonic tomato is loaded with green tomatoes right now and the
Black Krim has a few of its own.The
pepper plants are also doing well.The
Carmen and Ancho pepper plants are nearly as tall as the tomato plants, and the
Carmen has lots of green peppers.It
looks like the Ancho pepper plant will produce a lot of peppers in a burst,
which is fine since I’ll dry most of them.It looks like things are on track for some salsa in August.

The
parsnip and okra are doing well.I know
okra is a true hot weather plant, but the parsnip (Lancer) doesn’t mind the heat a
bit.When the okra really starts
producing I plan to pickle some of it.The potato bed in the background has one cage of Red Pontiacs
remaining.I just dug up the blue potatoes
a few days ago.It will get
a planting of beans.Beans are the one
vegetable I can eat anytime, and they are good frozen.

﻿

The
small patch of beans at the end of the bed has made just a few beans.I noticed a cottontail around it a few days
ago and it’s made some trips back since then.It hasn’t eaten any beans closer to the house.I’ll have to put the cages back over those
beds tonight.

The squash have taken a beating since they wilted in the
last heat wave.I pulled out the Honey
Bear Acorn and Cocozelle plants.Another
Cocozelle was seeded about two weeks ago and it is growing fast.The Butternut has partially recovered and if
we can just avoid any more one hundred degree weather like yesterday it may
snap out of it.It’s setting new vines
and has set a number of butternuts.

The
tulip poplars are under a lot of stress.Most of them leafed out too early in the warm spring then lost all their
foliage to a hard freeze.Then the tulip
scale set in and sucked away more energy (and made a mess in the process).Add to that the heat and drought and many of
them are not looking well.I consider
tulip poplar almost a weed tree anyway so I won’t get too upset if I lose this
one inside the driveway.

I’ve
been watering the brownest patches of lawn just to save it.If the turf dies completely then weeds will
take over.So far the grass still has a
few blades of green in it so it should recover with some rain.It got me thinking about how I maintain the
lawn.Right now I close mow about 12,000
sq feet of lawn regularly and high mow another 8,000 sq feet with the brush
cutter about four times a year.I asked
myself why I am cutting (or was cutting since the grass hasn’t been cut since
early June) all that expanse of lawn when it’s not used for anything.

I decided that the next time I mow, and who knows when that
will be, I will make a diagonal cut across the large rectangle of lawn in the
picture and mow inside the cut.In other
words the triangle close to the woods will then be high cut and the triangle
close to the house will be close cut.That should transfer several thousand sq feet to the high cut category,
saving me time and fuel. You might
notice that the high cut grass is in much better shape than the lawn.

The expanded high cut area will have the potential to be
used for animals.Right now I’m looking
into raising pastured rabbits in this area.

Monday, July 23, 2012

The shortage of green vegetables continues.There’s a lot of green tomatoes on the vine,
but it’s going to be a few more weeks before any are ripe.The pepper plants are healthy and full of
green peppers, in fact the ancho pepper plant is as large as the Black Krim
tomato plant.They should start producing
any time now.A new summer squash
(Cocozelle) is growing fast.I just hope
it doesn’t get whatever did in the last plant.

The second patch of beans, Roma II, are diseased.I should rip them out because it doesn’t look
like they are going to amount to . . . a hill of beans.This is the first time I have planted this
variety, an F1 from Parks.Maybe it was
the heat.The next batch of beans,
Provider, look fine, but it will be another week or two before those beans are
ready.

The
cucumbers have been providing a steady supply and the okra is producing more
all thetime as the plants become small
trees.Last year the cucumbers succumbed
to bacterial wilt after I got two or three cukes.This year the Diva is growing like it’s on
steroids, and will soon start producing heavily.The Picolino (from Pinetree) is not nearly as
vigorous but has been providing small cukes for several weeks.In fact the Diva was seeded a week after the
Picolino was set out as a seedling and the Diva is now many times larger. The cuke on the right is a Diva, the two
smaller ones are Picolino.

I had to compare the two.Diva is an excellent cucumber, fresh tasting and crisp.But the Picolino has it beat.It’s much better.Too bad it doesn’t do as well in the
heat.

I
dug up a cage of Red Pontiac potatoes.Adding in the two potatoes that I pulled from the same cage last week,
the yield for this cage was 8 lbs, 11 oz.That’s from five pieces.If I had
maintained adequate water while the plants were growing I think the yield could
have been better.I’ll dig up the cage
of blue potatoes later this week.

This is the last broccoli, a Gypsy.Not much of a head and half of it was
underripe, but after the heat wave I’m not complaining.It was still good to eat.I picked one of the cabbages that had been
barely growing for months - I think they were planted in April.It had a
baseball sized head.To say that it was
inedible is too kind.The remaining
cabbages were allocated to the compost bin.More evidence that most cabbage crops have to grow quickly without
interruptions or they will not be good.

This
butternut squash was pulled off the vine and chewed by an animal.Squirrel? I tend to attribute any animal damage in the garden to squirrels unless I can prove otherwise. I'm convinced they are vindictive little animals.

Friday, July 20, 2012

I’ve wanted to build some
kind of rack that holds the garden tools – shovels, hoes, rakes, stakes – and
can be moved around.For years the
garden tools have leaned against the house.Now that I have put flower beds along the sunroom and moved the compost
bin to the gable end of the house the tool clutter has gotten even worse.

I checked on the internet
and found a standard design, basically a square rack that didn’t look like it
could be adapted to move easily.I saw a
similar rack at Lowe’s holding a bunch of shovels.It’s sturdy but not what I want.I came up with a rough design of a cart with
trapezoidal sides and wheels so the cart could be tilted back and rolled.

Designing a cart is not
so easy as it may seem.I can design a
shed in detail, since the height of benches and doors is standard.But a cart that rolls is different.I don’t know what lengths and angles of the
frame will make a cart that can be moved easily and feels right.That takes some trial and error.So I came up with a rough sketch then designed
it as it was built.This is a prototype that
has to be good enough for my own use. I
wanted to built it as much as possible from scrap materials on hand.I also wanted the cart to be as light as
possible but structurally sound.That
means not using heavier wood than necessary.For the framing I settled on deck flooring ripped on the table saw
into two equal pieces, and I just happened to have some deck flooring in the
lumber pile.This gave framing wood
about one and one-eighth inch thick by two and three-quarter inches wide.

I
started by building a bottom frame, just a rectangle extended at one end for
the wheels.I notched the upright posts
where they attach to the frame to make it look less bulky.Everything is put together with screws.Screws are not only stronger fasterners than
nails, but can be removed easily with a cordless drill if things need changing
at a later time.

Here’s
where the guesswork as to “feel” entered in.The upper members of the side frames were attached to make a trapezoid.Since a handle will be attached at the upper
end of the sidearms I had to experiment a little with the angles and heights of
attachment to get what I thought would be an ergonomically comfortable
shape.I left the pieces extra long so
they could be trimmed back later if needed.

The trapezoid shape on
the sides puts the handle at a comfortable height while the rack itself should
be tall enough in back for large tools and short enough in front for smaller
tools and stakes.Unlike a rectangle
which can be racked into a parallelogram a trapezoid resists racking, although
not as well as a triangle.That means
the sides shouldn’t need additional bracing.

The
next picture jumps ahead after a number of steps were completed.(It was really hot and I couldn’t motivate
myself to stop and take pictures).The
upper crossmembers were attached to give the basic frame.A dowel was screwed to the upper arms as a
temporary handle.And the crosshatching
was put in the upper frame to give slots for individual tools.

The
next day I looked at this and decided it was all wrong.The upper frame should match the footprint of
the lower frame.The notched uprights had
to go.First I moved the crossmembers of
the bottom frame inside the uprights.Then I unscrewed each upright, cut off the notch and put an angle cut on
the top to match the angle of the upper frame.The upright post was then reattached to the top and bottom frames.The bottom frame was raised a few inches at
the front so the upright protruded several inches below the frame.This way the cart rests on the wheels and the
front uprights. Getting close!

You can also see that a temporary
diagonal brace was put on the back face of the cart.This rectangular face was large enough to go
out of square so it had to be locked into square.Wheels were attached using ½ inch bolts.Dividers were set in the upper and lower
frames to separate tools.

The
cart was taking shape, but the next morning I looked at it and thought it was
too bulky.The front uprights on the
outside just weren’t right.I removed
them and put them inside the frame.After that a
piece of plywood was put on the back face to replace the temporary brace. Plywood was attached to the bottom of the lower frame as a floor for the
tools.The floor slopes toward the back
and has weep holes in the frame to drain water. I think the cart looks a lot leaner now.

It
was getting near completion, but the finish work in a project always seems to
drag on.At one point I thought it was
close enough.I loaded it with the tools
and found it need a few more tweaks.The small pitchfork had a handle grip that would not fit between the dividers.This is the almost
finished cart, with the handle attached.

A
place was made at the front to hold short bamboo stakes.The back of the cart has a pocket for
small tools or gloves.And yes I used
whatever wood I could find.I had to buy
a cedar 1x4 and the bolts for the wheels, that’s it. The cart tips back easily and feels balanced when I move it. My main complaint is the lawn mower wheels are too small and tend to catch any stick or bump.

Here
it is loaded up with gardening implements of destruction.What a relief to get those tools in one
spot!After I use this for awhile I’ll
see if any more changes are needed.Then
I plan to build a more finished cart from new wood and see if there is any
demand for this kind of product.With
all the measurements at hand, building the second cart will take a fraction of
the time it took to make this one.

Monday, July 16, 2012

The
recent heat wave took its toll on vegetable production.Most of the harvest was the last batch of
onions.That’s over 14 pounds of onions
for the year.

I
noticed two Red Pontiac potatoes were exposed on the soil surface so I went
ahead and pulled them out.Nice sized
potatoes and I’m hoping that they are all that size when the rest of them are
dug up.

These
okra got a little too big and were a little tough.I always seem to forget to check the okra
when I go out into the beds.The red
okra plants started off slow but are really growing now.

The tomatoes stopped setting during the stretch of 100
degree weather.To make matters worse
the earliest tomatoes on the Supersonic plant had blossom end rot and were
discarded.There was one more ripe Black
Krim tomato to pick but a critter got it before me.Sunday morning it was on the ground, busted
open but not eaten.Bird?Squirrel?There won’t be any more tomatoes until August, and my plans for making
fresh salsa will have to wait .At least
the Supersonic plant has worked through the blossom end rot episode and has set
a lot of fruit now.

I
like the Supersonic tomato.It has
medium sized heart-shaped tomatoes with great flavor.They almost never split.It’s full of green tomatoes now (plant on
right in picture) while the Black Krim plant looks like it is trying to get a
second wind.The peppers have also put
on a growth spurt after the hottest weather was over while the lone eggplant remains puny.

It’s still hot with most days reaching 90-95 degrees.Many plants are a little stressed, but not as
bad as when temps were over 100.Since
I’ve been pumping water from the pond I’ve brought the moisture levels in the
beds back to where they need to be.I’ve settled into a routine of watering every
second evening now.The pump really
moves the water, probably 10 to 15 gallons a minute, so I can water the
vegetable beds, flower beds and the driest patches in the lawn, then return and
give the vegetable beds a second soaking in about 90 minutes.

The squash suffered the worst setbacks.The last 100 degree day many of the squash leaves turned yellow as if going into shock.The Cocozelle summer squash went into a wilt and did not make it.I pulled it and checked for the borer - nothing.It’s replacement was seeded a few weeks ago and is growing well.The acorn squash still looks rough but has new growth.The butternut lost most of the vines on the trellis and some butternuts.It’s growing new vines and it looks (knock on wood) like it will make it.The butternut has been a bulletproof plant for several years.It never gets the borer and was the only cucurbit to make it through bacterial wilt last year.

Yes
there are still some cabbage family plants left.The Gonzales cabbage have had baseball sized
heads for several weeks.I should pick
them but don’t know if they will be edible.There’s also two cauliflower plants that are actually heading up and two
brussells sprouts that are doing well.The
Diva cucumber in the back of the picture thrives in the heat and should start
producing soon.The Picolino cucumber in
the forefront does not like the heat and has grown little as of late.

In the former greens bed there’s a Gyspy broccoli, which is
supposed to be heat tolerant, that is making an attempt to produce a head.There’s also a patch of Provider beans, some
Danvers carrots and Parade scallions.

The parsnip and okra have thrived in the heat.In this bed there’s a row of scallions and
two rows of Roma II beans.The Romas
also stalled during the hottest weather but have set a lot of small beans
now.The potatoes in the back bed are
nearly finished.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Finally some relief from the heat on Sunday.Saturday the temperature
reached 106 degrees here in SW Indiana, the third consecutive day of 100+ degree
weather, after a week with highs in the upper 90’s.The weatherman called this an epic heat wave
and for once that was not an exaggeration.The hot weather has taken its toll on the vegetable plants.The tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and squash
mostly stopped setting blossoms or developing fruits.I expect some gaps in production soon.The okra plants thrived in this weather.

I watered heavily from the pond nearly every day and most of
the plants stayed healthy, even though they did not grow much.Saturday all the squash plants showed a lot
of chlorosis (yellowing) of the leaves.I think this was more a result of the heat shutting down some
biochemical processes, not nitrogen deficiency, as this happened suddenly.

It
was a week to get things out of the ground.I dug up the Yukon Gold potatoes (previous post).The second batch of onions dried.I cut off the tops and rubbed off the outer
skins.I pulled up the third and last
batch of onions and spread them out on the screen to dry.That leaves empty bed space of about 25
square feet that I will seed with snap beans shortly.

I
harvested two Italian sweet peppers and some small hot peppers.I’ve tossed a lot of developing peppers and
tomatoes that were burned from the heat or had blossom end rot.It looks like the tomatoes and peppers are
working through the BER, sure hope so.I
think much of the problem was due to inadequate water during the heat wave.

The
cage of Yukon Gold tomatoes was clearly finished.This morning I removed the cage and support
posts and dug up the potatoes.This
variety does not usually give the yields of the Red Pontiacs, which will last
for a few more weeks.I got 5 pounds, 4
oz from five small tubers.The two red
potatoes are from a runner that found it’s way from the adjacent cage of Red
Pontiacs.Now I can make one of my
favorite comfort foods – simmered potatoes, green beans, onions and sausage.

This
is the second batch of onions drying out.There’s
one more batch this size still in the beds.I built a wood frame, about 2’ x 4’ in dimension with ½ inch wire screen
where the onions can dry in the sun.Onions
dry quickly in this heat.By 11 AM today
the temperature was above 90 F.The high
on the July 4 was 102, and at 3 PM today it’s 101 according to Intellicast.Friday and Saturday the predicted highs are
104. The tomatoes and peppers are not setting many viable fruit now.

Now that I am watering
the beds by pumping water from the pond I realize that I had not been putting
enough water down on the beds when I watered from the house system.Digging down into the soil I found it lacking
moisture about six to eight inches down.The plants had been pulling water out of this zone and not
enough was trickling down to replace it.The rule of thumb is an inch of water a week, butwhen the daily highs are upper 90’s or more,
the sun is blazing in a cloudless sky and there’s also some wind up then the
plants probably need two or three inches of water a week.I’ve been laying down a lot of water almost
daily and the plants are responding well.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Last
spring I bought red onion sets from the farm supply store to fill in after much of the yellow storage
onion seed from last year did not germinate.The recent windy weather broke the spine of many of them and knocked them over.I pulled up a batch last week and let them
dry on the edge of a bed.Many of them
are nice sized bulbs.Sunday I pulled
more up, most of them red onions. I'll let these dry for a week or so in the abundant sun and heat (actually too abundant).

Again a diverse harvest.The first Black Krim tomato is almost ready but not quite.There’s a little bit of a learning curve for
harvesting heirloom tomatoes so I’m checking the plant daily.For the week:Beans 19 oz, okra 2 oz, summer squash 19 oz, cucumber 10 oz, kohlrabi 11
oz, and onions 2.5 lb, total for the year 45 lbs.Also 1.5 lbs of catfish fillets.

It’s
kind of early in the season to think of pulling up plantings, but that’s where
the garden is at. The first patch of beans was seeded between two potato cages
in the trapezoidal bed.There was space,
but little sunlight.I got a few pickings of beans, and it’s always
nice to get early beans, but by now there were only a few new flower buds.Removing the beans allows more movement of
air through the potatoes, which are succumbing slowly to disease.Except for the blue potatoes on the right. Into
the compost bin the beans went.

The
squash were a hard call.Saturday
afternoon with the temps in the high 90’s I found that the Honeybear Acorn and
the Cocozelle squash were badly wilted and many of the leaves were dying.After dinner I started the pond pump (see
last post) and gave them a good soaking.Overnight we got some rain – the
first rain since early May – a whole ¼ inch!Sunday morning I stumbled out of bed and watered the beds again. The beds got a good soaking. Does the Acorn squash in the center look like out of sorts? To me it does.

By
early afternoon these squash were wilted again.The leaves were an off-color metallic yellowish-green.They just didn’t look right.I found that none of the fruits on the Acorn
or the Cocozelle were sound.In fact the
Acorn plant had produced numerous fruit
for weeks and not one of them had ever developed.I’ve found that once a squash gets like this
it’s not going to pull out of it.Game
over.I pulled both plants up and put
them in the compost bin. The Cocozelle is below. I had already trimmed off half the leaves the previous day.

Actually
that’s not the end of the squash, here’s why.I started three different squash plants indoors – Butternut, Acorn, and
Cocozelle.When I set the seedlings into
the beds on May 1, I planted a few seeds of the same cultivars near the
transplants.They were backup
plants.Now all the transplants of each
variety have been removed and ceded their squash turf to the backup plants that
were direct seeded (the Butternut that was started indoors was pulled over a
month ago).And these plants, although
not large, look healthy. In fact this morning I picked a one pound squash from Cocozelle 2.

Here’s some possible reasons why the squash started
indoors did not make it:1) The seedlings got a shiver from some cold
weather shortly after transplanting and never fully recovered while the nearby seeds
were still underground and not affected2) Direct seeded squash just do better than transplants, or3)It’s
more complicated, like subtle differences in weather over two weeks and I’ll
never know.It’s probably all of the
above.At any rate I’m rethinking the
whole notion of seeding squash indoors.Next
spring I’ll direct seed the squash in stages, about one seeding a week in May
and select for the healthiest plants.

As for the summer squash, I planted a few seeds about a foot
away from the remaining plant.Why not? This one may succumb to the borer.It took the first squash plant only seven
weeks from seeding to the first fruit.That’s less time than a snap bean so it’s realistic to expect squash
from a plant seeded now.Seeds are cheap
considering the potential yields so it’s well worth the investment.

And the onions: the
sets were put in March 22.That’s about
100 days to get nice bulbs.Could I put
in sets of short day onions now and get another batch by the end of
September?If I could find some sets it
would be worth a try, but most likely all the stores have discarded their onion
sets by now.

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About this Blog

I moved to this place in SW Indiana in 2008. The property is six acres of woods, pasture, yard and pond. Usable garden space with full sun is limited by surrounding trees to 250 square feet of raised beds, more the size of an urban garden. I use intensive techniques: rotation of plant families, nutrient cycling, cages and trellises, row cover and cold frames to get the most out of the space.

About Me

A native Hoosier, I worked in the construction trades and later in life got a chemistry degree and worked in a research lab until retirement. I raise vegetables because they taste better and it saves money. What other hobby pays for itself? I'm a cheapskate - I won't buy new seeds until the old ones aren't any good. I'm also a bit of a lazy gardener - if I can buy the seedlings I want then why start the seeds, or if I can engineer a way to make it less work I'll do so. I also drink too much beer. But I never (well almost never) work in the garden and drink beer.